


10 Points About Jazmine Becket

by RoryKurago



Series: Kurago [8]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family, Family Dynamics, Gen, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 11:31:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3379949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jazmine Becket is a child, cold and wet and left behind in a blizzard, she catches a snowflake perfectly on her tongue and wishes to be an only child.</p>
            </blockquote>





	10 Points About Jazmine Becket

**Author's Note:**

> Ties in a little to 'Blizzard' in 31 Days of PacRim, but works alone.

1.       

Jazmine Becket is two years younger than her brothers.

 

2.        

She hates them. She hates them for leaving her out in the cold, for needing to save the world, for being brothers, for being so damn good at what they do.  
She also hitchhikes to Kodiak from Boston and fights past security to see them. (Their uncle lives in Massachusetts; she will not take handouts; and the jobs she manages to find do not pay enough for airline tickets these days.) 

 

3.        

Every interviewer asks the same questions. Mother, father, childhood. Always ‘so your brothers--’.  
How many times do they ask before she gets sick of it and says: do they actually want to talk to her or are they just tired of being stonewalled by Yance and Raleigh?  
No one asks how many languages she speaks, what her childhood wishes were, or why she hates the snow. She doesn't hate her brothers; not really.

 

4.        

She finds the furthest country she speaks enough of the language to get by in, where she doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about the things that happened, and learns to say _I don’t understand.  
_ It snows there—but her co-workers learn not to comment, and change the channel on the weather reports. It doesn’t have anything to do with Richard Becket driving off in a snowstorm so his children couldn’t track him down when they finally got home from work and school.

 

5.        

Jazmine has degrees in business and textiles; she needs both. Working in the office of an import/export business out of the capital brings her the little news of the PPDC she needs. Until Yancy dies.  
She runs deeper.  
It’s snowing when the news comes through; only Milena tuning the radio away from the weather means they catch the SBS broadcast. The thump of a sheet of ice sliding off the warehouse roof and splintering on the pavement in the silence makes Jazmine flinch. It’s not the fact that the capital is snowed in for three days that makes her hate it.  
It’s not Raleigh lying to her as a child that if she could catch a snowflake perfectly on her tongue she could make a wish, or the snow melting down the back of her collar when she fell over trying.  
When the storm clears, she runs—before the reporters can find her.

 

6.        

Pentecost will not order Raleigh to Drift with her—so General Krieger does it for him. He promises Raleigh any position he wants— _after_  they make absolutely sure Raleigh-Jazmine is not viable.  
Twelve hours on a plane from where she was to where he is. She is one sibling closer to being an only child; nobody managed to find Yancy, but what they don’t tell her on the way in is that nobody’s quite sure they found Raleigh either.  
There’s a cracking, splintering sound in the back of her mind when she lays eyes on him for the first time in three years. It sounds like ice sliding off a roof and the death of her faith in the Corps.  
He’s there but he isn’t. And neither, he shows her (unconsciously, unwillingly), is Yancy. Anywhere. Ever.  
She peels out of the Drift lab screaming, leaving her brother grey and shaking in the other chair. If she leaves a piece of herself to replace the bit she takes of him, she doesn’t feel it tearing away.  
This time when she runs she doesn’t leave an address.

 

7.        

Their Uncle always knows where she is. She sends cards. She wonders, sometimes, how many times he sent something back that missed her because she’d already moved on.  
Once, a journalist finds her.  
She doesn’t write her uncle for six months, and when she does it’s a postcard of a child holding an icecream cone and flipping off the camera in old-timey black and white. No markers of country or town besides the stamp.  
The journalist wanted to talk about Yancy, or learn anything that might help track Raleigh. She didn’t even know he was missing.  
Putting words to the first postcard after the black-and-white one still doesn’t come easily but she gives their uncle a phone number to call her on, and when she answers the phone she almost breaks down in the hostel lobby. The foyer smells like wet carpet, filthy backpackers, and frying dust from the over-worked central air trying to make the hostel habitably warm, and the new arrivals folding tatty snowdamp maps are gesturing impatiently that they want to check in, but Jazmine only motions over the other staffer and curls up under the desk with the handset. With her eyes closed it’s almost like being home again.  
She’s moved on for ignoring guests; there’s no number to send him for a while. A backpacker with a Californian accent offers to help carry her pack to the tram. Only when she declines does he say,  
“You’re that other one, aren’t you? The Becket sister.”  
How many blond-haired, blue-eyed American girls are there in between places like she is? Less than there used to be. Fewer still who get snappy with drunk itinerants saying ten fishermen’s a pretty sweet trade-off for one dumb Ranger. Was she moved on for ignoring guests or for breaking that window with one of their faces?  
There’s no number to send their uncle for a while because there’s no number, period.

 

8.        

Raleigh is missing for two years before he resurfaces in Red Deer and reminds Krieger of his promise. Jazmine receives notice of the cut-off of Yancy’s pension when it redirects to Anchorage. It’s restored after a month. They still don’t know where she is—but they stop looking.

 

9.        

In this new economy, what does Jazmine have that is worth a wage? Degrees in business and textiles. Connections. Smarts. Looks. Her name.  
She uses only one of these. New town—satellite town: ten thousand people, a few hundred miles from the coast in any direction but nowhere near the Zones for rich, famous, and frightened. Here, the people are just frightened. Here ‘import/export’ means shipments of ration boxes and aid supplies, and ‘managing’ means hauling boxes in all weather, documenting the takings, driving trucks and distributing the poverty. She is barely PPDC. Civilian outreach. It’s not far enough, but it’s the furthest she can get. To go the extra mile she dyes her hair black and swears off alcohol. It only helps when she avoids coastal refugees, Americans, and anyone too vocally supportive of the Corps. They’re the resistance now, haven’t you heard? This time Jazmine doesn’t put anyone’s head through a window but she thinks about it. Then she thinks about cartoons, Star Wars and the silhouette of a cut-out in her soul the shape of her brother. What they’ll do if they drag her back.  
They know where she is—they just stopped looking.  
She wears the pale blue UN armband over her sweaters when required, goes unstamped whenever possible, and doesn’t draw attention to the dimple in her chin or the way she smiles like Raleigh. It’s getting easier not to smile: everything around her is pulled out of boxes stamped _UN Crisis Corps_ and even with ration books the people she sees are getting skeletal, body and soul. They're cut-outs of people, with bony eyes and hollowed out wrists. She knows a few things about that these days.  
She still refuses to learn the word for _Drift._  
_Brother, hero_ —she knows those.  
_Jaeger_ is untranslatable.  
She says _I don’t understand_  anyway and turns away to pull the next box off the back of the truck. _I’m not the person you think I am._  
A man she grows fond of pushes black hair away from her eyes where it’s become disarrayed under the rim of her touque, and tells her that her eyelashes are so pretty catching snowflakes as they work.  
She pushes his hand away. “Never say that again.”  
She has learnt, along the way, that while she could wish away her support (hoping that without it she would learn to be stronger), nothing will make her stronger by magic. Not shooting stars, dandelions, or snowflakes perfectly caught. She has learnt to hold onto the things that hold on to her, and made the anti-wish: to be as strong as she needs _and_ value what support she is offered.  
Now there’s a number to give her uncle, but when she asks him, he hasn’t heard from Raleigh in eight months.

 

10.     

When Jazmine Becket is a child, cold and wet and left behind in a blizzard, she catches a snowflake perfectly on her tongue and wishes to be an only child.  
One: Yancy goes fishing for ten men and a trawler. He doesn’t come back.  
Two: Raleigh is dead for twelve hours and thirty-eight minutes before the helicopters find them. (Him and Mako Mori on their escape pods in the Pacific.)  
For twelve hours and thirty-eight minutes, Jazmine sits by the radio in the Crisis Corps dorm holding her new wish like an icepick. She’ll dig her way out of this if necessary. She leaves the UN armband on the dispatcher’s desk and gets on a plane.

**Author's Note:**

> It got away from me. If anyone want to help wrangle it back...


End file.
